Crisis, Opportunity and At Will Employment

Many people feel that outsourcing an IT department to an IT support Austin is an intrinsically negative activity for a company to engage in. They feel this way because in order to outsource a job it means that the people who perform that job or function inside the company will necessarily loose their positions. This is because loosing one’s position and source of income and livelihood is always a disruptive and anxiety ridden experience.

But this experience can also be the opportunity to perhaps improve one’s position as well. It is a well known adage that in the Chinese language the words for “crisis” and “opportunity” are the same word. Unfortunately this adage is somewhat inaccurate as I once had occasion to ask a native Mandarin Chinese speaker whether it is in fact true that “crisis” and “opportunity” are the same word in Chinese. She replied that the two words were similar but not actually the same. Nevertheless, the fact that they are similar is good enough for the sake of this article to make the point I want to make and that point is that having one’s IT job outsourced to a managed IT services Austin is not necessarily a horrible situation.

Many people feel that their “safe” nine to five job working in an office offers them security. Unfortunately, the sense of security that this job provides is illusory. It is illusory because the company they work for can terminate their employment at any time for any non discriminatory reason. This is because non contract employment in the United States is governed by the common law “at will” theory. This of course is not true in other countries particularly in Western Europe for example. In France there are legal protections that make it difficult for a company to terminate their employees. These types of protections although providing some degree of security for the employee tend to have a dampening effect on overall levels of employment.